1999 SN 196 Dash Restoration

[Emmett@Norman]

It's officially varnishing season on the west side of Lake Norman. I finally finished cutting out and applying veneer to the gauge panel. It was more tedious than outright difficult. I trimmed the veneer with an exacto knife while cutting from the back (plastic) side. The veneer side sat on top of a towel to both prevent damage and give the blade somewhere to be. After the rough cut I honed it in with the sanding drum on my dremel.

Now, I'm on a three day cycle with one round of varnish going down on one panel each day. This gives the other panels the full 3 days to cure. While this might seem time consuming, it is very important to let the varnish harden before sanding. Sanding soft varnish causes all sorts of problems and can lead to a very wavy finish. Below you can see the freshly varnished switch panel on the bench while the stereo panel and gauge panel are hanging out waiting their turns.

That's what I'll be up to for the next couple weeks. When I'm happy with the varnish, the rebuild will begin!

[Emmett@Norman]

I knew I had a few weeks of varnishing ahead of my when I last posted. I was right, but today I got the dash put back together minus the stereo and the clock. I'm waiting on a new stereo cover (ordered) and my clock is being refurbished as it looked terrible.

Here's how things got back together.

I installed the switch and stereo panel. In the photo below you can see I scraped the blind screw posts originally used by Nautique in favor of stainless screws with lock nuts on the back. I did this because most of the original posts failed, if I used my boat on a private lake that had smoother water I would have considered using them again.



The clips I got from the hot rod shop worked really well on the indicator lights.



As wiring progressed, the goal is to remove all the masking tape. Once a connection lands, tape is removed. I tried to clean up the wiring the best I could, but short of rebuilding the factory wiring harness, installing a ground bus bar, and rethinking the whole philosophy it's still a bit of a mess.

Lining up the holes for the stereo and switch panels was easy because the original posts had marked the location to drill. the gauge panel which I made from scratch was a different story. I lined it up, and marked the holes from behind with a silver sharpie then used a punch to make sure the drill didn't move around. I drilled an 1/8" hole first to get centered and followed up with the 3/16" final hole size. The masking tape is to prevent the wood veneer from splitting too badly, that was mostly successful.



The holes lined up well mostly because the original holes in the dash had been wallowed out something awful, big washers are covering that on final install. While getting the screws tightened I noticed a couple of gauges weren't lining up right away. This is because the panel isn't flat. I went ahead and installed 2 gauges to center things up and continued on with the screws.



Behind the scenes of this madness I installed the new perfect pass module and routed the depth finder wire from the dash to the engine compartment. I'm going to use a thru hull transponder for the depth finder but in reading the instructions they recommend calibrating it in the water before gluing it to the hull. I used fish tape to pull the wire from the hole under the dash to the engine compartment. The black box on the left is my speaker crossover module, that was originally floating around in this compartment even though it had a fresh 3M adhesive back to it. I peeled the sticker off and stuck it on, good luck sticker!



Back to the dash, once I got the gauge panel installed I started hooking up the gauges. I used a socket and extender but no wrench. Not sure if I'm correct but there's a lot of plastic back there and I was afraid to overtighten things and break plastic.



There's no way to show in a picture that I actually improved the wiring. But I'll recap the changes I made.

- I derived new constant hot (from the wiring harness) connections for the bilge pump switch and the clock. The clock connection was scabed onto incoming hot to the ignition switch which didn't seem very clean to me. I simply cut the ignition incoming hot wire, and came off with three wires (ignition, clock, and bilge pump). I float switch is being installed at the bilge pump so depressing the dash bilge switch will turn on the pump if the float is up.
- My boat had switches for heater and shower and I don't have either of these. I relabeled these and used the switches to power perfect pass and the depth finder respectively. Perfect pass was originally powered off the tach, why not have a switch was my thought.
- I relabeled the Auxiliary power to stereo because that is all it's powering right now.
- The 12v plug in the dash was wired by a crazy person (see original photo up the page). I changed the breaker to a 20 amp because the new fat sack pump I got for Christmas pulls 14 amps, wired directly from the switch to the 12v plug. The greatest mystery of this project has been what in tarnation the orange with white stripe and orange with black stripe were originally connected to. They weren't getting powered by the dash, I can't think of what they were doing since they were just connected to the same binging post previously. I considered reconnecting them to each other but abandoned them in place instead. When I test the boat, I will see if there's anything not working...



I think that's it. I broke the stereo cover and a new one is on order, the clock is being repaired by a friend who loves building watches, he's very thorough, very cheap, but I don't rush his schedule, I can install the clock anytime....

[MN Ryan]

Looks great!

[CincinnatiCC]

Great work!